Tagged: United Kingdom

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has laid bare the woeful state of European defense. For decades Europe has been reliant on an American security blanket, one that has put Europe’s various defense departments to sleep. Putin’s recent belligerence has given them a loud wake-up call. What they will do about the aggression on their frontier remains to be seen.

The United States is a political anomaly. Throughout time there has never been a nation so politically, culturally, and militarily dominant. Rome, even at its height, had rivals. So too did the British Empire, which at its apex made pretense to the rule of the waves, in spite of near constant challenges to its power from forces seeking to upset or supplant it. The international stability and peace created by these great empires, the Pax Romana and Pax Britannica, the Roman Peace and the British Peace, served in their times to guarantee security and relative prosperity within their spheres of influence. Yet they could never do so unchallenged.

More

Panel 8 of the 9th International Conference on Climate Change was on the subject of “Costs and Benefits of Renewable Energy.” The panel was focused on the subject of renewable energy, specifically the high cost and potentially devastating economic consequences produced by the federal government’s efforts to replace the current energy sources with renewables.

This summer’s elections to the European Parliament, the legislative body of the European Union, marked a radical swing against the greater centralization of power in the hands of Eurocrats in Brussels. A great many of the Euroskeptic parties that had big wins were the French National Front and the British United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Other Euroskeptic parties on the continent, in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece, and elsewhere, also made out quite well. It was a wake-up call to many European leaders who had been complacent and tried to label Euroskeptics as fringe or extremist. The performance of UKIP in particular, which beat all three mainstream parties in the election, made those labels ridiculous.

With the birth of social media people have become far more interconnected to each other, and have become able to gain access to news and information with incredible rapidity. That new access has given groups unprecedented power to organize. Social networking tools have been mobilized in the United States to develop grassroots political action on a myriad of topics. It was what propelled Barack Obama to office, and it aided the swift rise and mobilization of the Tea Party.

As Americans we are blessed to live under a constitutional republican form of government, with lawmakers constrained by the dictates of a founding document that is difficult to change or subvert. The United States Constitution is the prototype of the modern written constitution of so many countries, yet it remains in many ways unsurpassed as an exercise in the construction of a lasting system for the preservation of public order and individual liberty.

The siren song of independence and national self-determination has sounded once again across Europe. It is a song that holds echoes of a century ago, when the internal force of nationalism convulsed the European empires into world war. Yet, while the song remains the same, the tune has changed.

Culturally and politically, the United States and Great Britain have much in common; a shared heritage, similar economic and foreign policy goals, and a recently, a mutual proclivity toward socialized[…]